Sitemap.xml

1 - Assessments & Impacts

Sitemap.xml is a way for Google to access your website (without being dependant on your internal linking). While it's optional and does not promise indexing, it's especially useful if it's paired with the Google Search Console to monitor indexation.

Including a URL in the sitemap.xml while it is not in your internal linking can allow a page to be indexed, but it's important to note that this URL will not be able to rank in top rankings in Google search result pages.

2 - Recommendations

The main goal is to monitor the indexing of different pages of your site, it will be customary to create a sitemap.xml including all the pages you want to see indexed. This file must be updated automatically according to the lifecycle of the site.

Because your site is large, we recommend the creation and maintenance of a sitemap.xml by

• Typology of pages: categories, products, articles
• Within the limit 50,000 URLs per file and 50 MB - constraints set by search engines
• Insert the sitemaps at the end of your robots.txt at the root of your site cdkeys.com/robots.txt
• Have a sitemap per language
• When you click on each, you will find the sitemaps by category of pages like this:

• Create a sitemap-index.xml to list all of your sitemap.xml
• At the end of your robots.txt, enter the all your sitemaps, including your Sitemap-index.xml Eg:

Robots.txt

• We recommend that you do the hreflang tags in the header of each page instead of doing it via the sitemap.

More information if needed:

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/183668?hl=en

NB

• If ranking your images in Google images is important for you, you may want to include images to your sitemap. Procedure here
• If classifying the URLs requires too much work, just do the sitemap by language for now

Google Search Console

Provide the sitemap-index.xml in your Google Search Console to track the indexing of your different types of files. Google will automatically retrieve all sitemaps in the index.